Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 Studies from the Chronicles of Rome

Marion Crawford Francis

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pubOne.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. 'Arenula' - 'fine sand' - 'Renula,' 'Regola' - such is the derivation of the name of the Seventh Region, which was bounded on one side by the sandy bank of the Tiber from Ponte Sisto to the island of Saint Bartholomew, and which Gibbon designates as a 'quarter of the city inhabited only by mechanics and Jews.' The mechanics were chiefly tanners, who have always been unquiet and revolutionary folk, but at least one exception to the general statement must be made, since it was here that the Cenci had built themselves a fortified palace on the foundations of a part of the Theatre of Balbus, between the greater Theatre of Marcellus, then held by the Savelli, and the often mentioned Theatre of Pompey. There Francesco Cenci dwelt, there the childhood of Beatrice was passed, and there she lived for many months after the murder of her father, before the accusation was first brought against her. It is a gloomy place now, with its low black archway, its mouldy walls, its half rotten windows, and its ghostly court of balconies; one might guess that a dead man's curse hangs over it, without knowing how Francesco died

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• Italy
• My Last Duchess

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• Publié par: Pub One Info
• Date de parution: 23 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782819915553
• Langue: English

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VOLUME II
REGION VII REGOLA
'Arenula' – 'fine sand' – 'Renula,' 'Regola' – suchis the derivation of the name of the Seventh Region, which wasbounded on one side by the sandy bank of the Tiber from Ponte Sistoto the island of Saint Bartholomew, and which Gibbon designates asa 'quarter of the city inhabited only by mechanics and Jews.' Themechanics were chiefly tanners, who have always been unquiet andrevolutionary folk, but at least one exception to the generalstatement must be made, since it was here that the Cenci had builtthemselves a fortified palace on the foundations of a part of theTheatre of Balbus, between the greater Theatre of Marcellus, thenheld by the Savelli, and the often mentioned Theatre of Pompey.There Francesco Cenci dwelt, there the childhood of Beatrice waspassed, and there she lived for many months after the murder of herfather, before the accusation was first brought against her. It isa gloomy place now, with its low black archway, its mouldy walls,its half rotten windows, and its ghostly court of balconies; onemight guess that a dead man's curse hangs over it, without knowinghow Francesco died. And he, who cursed his sons and his daughtersand laughed for joy when two of them were murdered, rebuilt thelittle church just opposite, as a burial-place for himself andthem; but neither he nor they were laid there. The palace used toface the Ghetto, but that is gone, swept away to the very laststone by the municipality in a fine hygienic frenzy, though, intruth, neither plague nor cholera had ever taken hold there in thepestilences of old days, when the Christian city was choked withthe dead it could not bury. There is a great open space there now,where thousands of Jews once lived huddled together, crowding andrunning over each other like ants in an anthill, in a state thatwould have killed any other people, persecuted occasionally, but onthe whole, fairly well treated; indispensable then as now to thespendthrift Christian; confined within their own quarter, asformerly in many other cities, by gates closed at dusk and openedat sunrise, altogether a busy, filthy, believing, untiring folkthat laughed at the short descent and high pretensions of a Romanbaron, but cringed and crawled aside as the great robber strode byin steel. And close by the Ghetto, in all that remains of the vastPortico of Octavia, is the little Church of Sant' Angelo inPescheria where the Jews were once compelled to hear Christiansermons on Saturdays.
Close by that church Rienzi was born, and it is forever associated with his memory. His name calls up a story oftentold, yet never clear, of a man who seemed to possess severaldistinct and contradictory personalities, all strong but by nomeans all noble, which by a freak of fate were united in one manunder one name, to make him by turns a hero, a fool, a Christianknight, a drunken despot and a philosophic Pagan. The Buddhistmonks of the far East believe today that a man's individual self isoften beset, possessed and dominated by all kinds of fragmentarypersonalities that altogether hide his real nature, which may inreality be better or worse than they are. The Eastern belief mayserve at least as an illustration to explain the sort of mixedcharacter with which Rienzi came into the world, by which heimposed upon it for a certain length of time, and which has alwaystaken such strong hold upon the imagination of poets, and writersof fiction, and historians.
Rienzi, as we call him, was in reality named'Nicholas Gabrini, the son of Lawrence'; and 'Lawrence,' being inItalian abbreviated to 'Rienzo' and preceded by the possessiveparticle 'of,' formed the patronymic by which the man is best knownin our language. Lawrence Gabrini kept a wine-shop somewhere in theneighbourhood of the Cenci palace; he seems to have belonged toAnagni, he was therefore by birth a retainer of the Colonna, andhis wife was a washer-woman. Between them, moreover, they made abusiness of selling water from the Tiber, through the city, at atime when there were no aqueducts. Nicholas Rienzi's mother washandsome, and from her he inherited the beauty of form and featurefor which he was famous in his youth. His gifts of mind were many,varied and full of that exuberant vitality which noble lineagerarely transmits; if he was a man of genius, his genius belonged tothat order which is never far removed from madness and always akinto folly. The greatest of his talents was his eloquence, the leastof his qualities was judgment, and while he possessed the courageto face danger unflinchingly, and the means of persuading vastmultitudes to follow him in the realization of an exalted dream, hehad neither the wit to trace a cause to its consequence, nor thecommon sense to rest when he had done enough. He had no mentalperspective, nor sense of proportion, and in the words of Madame deStaël he 'mistook memories for hopes.'
He was born in the year 1313, in the turbulent yearthat followed the coronation of Henry the Seventh of Luxemburg; andwhen his vanity had come upon him like a blight, he insulted thememory of his beautiful mother by claiming to be the Emperor's son.In his childhood he was sent to Anagni. There it must be supposedthat he acquired his knowledge of Latin from a country priest, andthere he lived that early life of solitude and retirement which,with ardent natures, is generally the preparation for an outburstof activity that is to dazzle, or delight, or terrify the world.Thence he came back, a stripling of twenty years, dazed withdreaming and surfeited with classic lore, to begin the struggle forexistence in his native Rome as an obscure notary.
It seems impossible to convey an adequate idea ofthe confusion and lawlessness of those times, and it is hard tounderstand how any city could exist at all in such absence of allauthority and government. The powers were nominally the Pope andthe Emperor, but the Pope had obeyed the commands of Philip theFair and had retired to Avignon, and no Emperor could even approachRome without an army at his back and the alliance of the GhibellineColonna to uphold him if he succeeded in entering the city. Themaintenance of order and the execution of such laws as existed,were confided to a mis-called Senator and a so-called Prefect. TheSenatorship was the property of the Barons, and when Rienzi wasborn the Orsini and Colonna had just agreed to hold it jointly tothe exclusion of every one else. The prefecture was hereditary inthe ancient house of Di Vico, from whose office the Via de'Prefetti in the Region of Campo Marzo is named to this day; thehead of the house was at first required to swear allegiance to thePope, to the Emperor, and to the Roman People, and as the threewere almost perpetually at swords drawn with one another, the oathwas a perjury when it was not a farce. The Prefects' principal dutyappears to have been the administration of the Patrimony of SaintPeter, in which they exercised an almost unlimited power afterInnocent the Third had formally dispensed them from allegiance tothe Emperor, and the long line of petty tyrants did not come to anend until Pope Eugenius the Fourth beheaded the last of the racefor his misdeeds in the fifteenth century; after him the office wasseized upon by the Barons and finally drifted into the hands of theBarberini, a mere sinecure bringing rich endowments to itsfortunate possessor.
In Rienzi's time there were practically three castesin Rome, – priests, nobles, and beggars, – for there was nothingwhich in any degree corresponded to a citizen class; such businessas there was consisted chiefly in usury, and was altogether in thehands of the Jews. Rome was the lonely and ruined capital of apestilential desert, and its population was composed of maraudersin various degrees.
The priests preyed upon the Church, the nobles uponthe Church and upon each other, the beggars picked the pockets ofboth, and such men as were bodily fit for the work of killing wereenlisted as retainers in the service of the Barons, whose steadyrevenues from their lands, whose strong fortresses within the city,and whose possession of the coat and mail armour which was then soenormously valuable, made them masters of all men except oneanother. They themselves sold the produce of their estates and thefew articles of consumption which reached Rome from abroad, inshops adjoining their palaces; they owned the land upon which thecorn and wine and oil were grown; they owned the peasants whoploughed and sowed and reaped and gathered; and they preserved theprivilege of disposing of their own wares as they saw fit. Theyfeared nothing but an ambush of their enemies, or the solemnexcommunication of the Pope, who cared little enough for theirdoings. The cardinals and prelates who lived in the city werechiefly of the Barons' own order and under their immediateprotection. The Barons possessed everything and ruled everythingfor their own profit; they defended their privileges with theirlives, and they avenged the slightest infringement on their powersby the merciless shedding of blood. They were ignorant, but theywere keen; they were brave, but they were faithless; they werepassionate, licentious and unimaginably cruel.
Such was the city, and such the government, to whichRienzi returned at the age of twenty, to follow the profession of anotary, probably under the protection of the Colonna. That thebusiness afforded occupation to many is proved by the vast numberof notarial deeds of that time still extant; but it is alsosufficiently clear that Rienzi spent much of his time in dreaming,if not in idleness, and much in the study of the ancient monumentsand inscriptions upon which no one had bestowed a glance forgenerations. It was during that period of early manhood that heacquired the learning and collected the materials which earned himthe title, 'Father of Archæology.' He seems to have been aboutthirty years old when he first began to speak in public places, tosuch audience as he coul